The Wisdom of Daniel: On the Interpretation of Dreamsetheses.whiterose.ac.uk/5917/7/7.pdf · The...
Transcript of The Wisdom of Daniel: On the Interpretation of Dreamsetheses.whiterose.ac.uk/5917/7/7.pdf · The...
IV.
The Wisdom of Daniel:
On the Interpretation of Dreams
Many dreames are made out by sagacious exposition from the signature of their subjects; carrying their interpretation in their fundamentall sence & mysterie of similitude, whereby hee that understands upon what naturall fundamentall every notionall dependeth, may by sumbolicall adaptation hold a readie way to read the characters of Morpheus.
—Thomas Browne, ‘On Dreams’, pp. 230—233.
But here it must be noted, that it is common for Persons in Dreams to be presented with various Figures, Forms, and Shapes of material things belonging unto the Animal, Vegetable and Mineral Kingdoms, which do signifie, or often times fore shew or denote Prosperity, Adversity, Health, Sickness, the Death of themselves or Friends…
—Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams & Visions, pp. 180—181
As phenomena, we have seen dreams explained as the products of a psychic
structure, as the wastage of the sleeping body, the mirror of thoughts or the
intrusion of foreign powers malignant or divine. But dreams also appear as
discrete and particular events, as a ‘happening’ which sometimes had a
particular meaning that could be related to these categories, but which might
also have a more particular meaning to those who experienced them. Many
cultures have maintained a fascination with the hieroglyphic nature of dreams,
have shared a conviction that their content is not explicit but abstruse, and
pursued techniques for deciphering and decoding their images. The
forerunners to Freudian interpretive principles of projecting, splitting and
condensing or of Jungian imaginative archetypes tend to have their roots in
ancient systems of divination, or other sources of sacred signs and poetic
devises. Beyond these crypto-symbolic responses to dream images, there exist
a multitude of possible responses to their aesthetic and phenomenal qualities,
not to mention the wider debate over the significance of dreams as a personal
or public event which we explored in chapter two.
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
158
In the past, historians have provided fascinating insights into the way in which
early modern individuals experienced, recorded and sometimes interpreted
their dreams. Of previous attempts to engage with the interpretation of early
modern dreams, the most thorough and successful probably remains Nigel
Smith’s analysis of the biblical and mystical imagery in the printed pamphlets of
radical prophets, popular astrologers and converts to independent
congregations.1 Peter Burke, Nigel Smith and Dianne Watt apply schematic
approaches to the cultural and visual symbolism of visions and dreams,
identifying common sources and trends that situate their significance to the
dreamer and their audiences.2 Attempts at dream interpretation by Patricia
Crawford, Mary Campbell and Reid Barbour are insightful, but rely primarily on
a modern interpretive gaze to compensate for a lack of reflective detail in the
‘secondary elaboration’ of their subjects.3 In Solomon’s Secret Arts, Paul Monod
reveals how Samuel Jeake the younger dreamt and interpreted his dreams
through the stock of astrological signs and their relative inclinations.4 My own
work focuses not on personal records of dreams and their readings, but on texts
which furnished a theoretical justification for practices of dream interpretation,
or presented examples of dream-readings in order to demonstrate their
application to a practitioner. Assessment of the methods employed and the
mentality brought to bear in such instances, however, is sporadic and would
benefit from further development. The skills used to interpret dreams need to
be explained with reference to other interpretive paradigms of the period, or
else they risk appearing unduly arbitrary. The authority of works like the
Oneirocritica of Artemidorus Daldianus, a dictionary of dream symbols brought
anachronistically out of its cultural time and place in the 2nd century, needs to
be explained. It should be explained how these methods were rationalized, and
why they might be plausible to the critical minds of the time, or otherwise
criticized and contested.
The cultural resources available for framing an approach to the art of
interpreting and discerning dreams were much wider than symbol books like
the Oneirocritica. I have argued that the philosophical, theological and medical
models explored in this thesis constituted the most powerful interpretive
frameworks applied to dreams and dreamers in the seventeenth century, and
reflected the intellectual concerns of the era. Embedded within these models
are principles which give explicit or implicit rules for interpreting individual
dreams by their content. These principles were often rooted in ideas about
1 Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, pp. 227—340.
2 Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, pp. 23—42; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, pp. 73—103,
227—340; pp. Watt, Secretaries of God, pp. 118—154. 3 Crawford, ‘Women’s Dreams in Early Modern England’, pp. 91—103; Campbell, ‘Dreaming,
Motion, Meaning’, pp. 15—30; Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture, pp. 91—117. 4 Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, p. 76.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
159
reading, interpretation and cognition which were much wider and far reaching
than books of dream symbols. These included but were not limited to exegetical
interpretations of Scripture (including the literal, tropological, allegorical and
anagogic), the practices of rhetoric and logic, and philosophical theories of
Peripatetic physics, hermetic sympathies, astrological motions, noetic
contemplation and mathematical formulas. The storehouses of this knowledge
were even more vast, encompassing not just the study of scripture and nature
but liturgical and sacramental imagery, classical literature in the form of
mythography, allegorical, pastoral and elegiac poetry, ancient hieroglyphics,
and proverbial and adagical wisdom.
I identify approaches to dream interpretation through studies of the mentality
that immersed early modern individuals in these multiple sources of meaning,
the ‘deep structures’ of early modern hermeneutic theory which William B.
Ashworth called the ‘emblematic world view’.5 This mentality rested on the
assumption that there existed little or no distinction between the spiritual and
moral meanings ascribed to objects and the fact of their physical properties and
existence, an assumption which allowed early moderns to generate
transcendent meanings from natural objects and embed these meanings in the
metaphysical structures explored in previous chapters. This ‘emblematic’ or
‘symbolist’ mentality, as described by Ashworth, M.D. Chenu and Peter Harrison,
evolved through patristic, medieval and renaissance intellectual life as an
attempt to unite theological and philosophical interpretations of the world.6
The seventeenth century is a time that paradoxically witnessed the reification of
this way of seeing at the same time as it saw its disruption and eventual decline
in England. The former trend was exemplified in the vogue for emblems and
emblem books, while the latter is evident in criticism of the application of moral
and metaphorical knowledge to nature, and critical responses to typological
knowledge in the late century.7 Harrison traces the decline of the emblematic
world view to an earlier point in the Reformation, when Protestantism’s
repudiation of sacramental theology, and its stripping back of exegetical
techniques to affirm only literal and typological interpretations of scripture,
contributed to a view of the world in which technical and instrumental
approaches to natural philosophy were gaining increasing dominance. 8
Ashworth has also suggested that the rise of antiquarian histories and Europe’s
colonial encounter was crucial because it confronted philosophers with a new
5 Ashworth, ‘Natural History and the Emblematic World View’, pp. 303—332
6 Ibid.; M.D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological
Perspectives in the Latin West (Chicago, 1968), pp. 99—145; Harrison, The Rise of Natural Science, pp. 11—63.
7 Harrison, The Rise of Natural Science, pp. 64—160; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, pp. 227—
266. 8 Harrison, The Rise of Natural Science, pp. 64—160.
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
160
world that was bereft of the layers of literary and moral descriptions that
saturated European perceptions of its own natural world.9
In the following sections I will track the influence of these trends on early
modern dream interpretation, observing how emblematic symbolism was
invoked to explain the meaningful nature of dream signs. I observe the
foundations of the symbolist mentality in the axiological dialectics of Greek
thought and in the cultural and educative practices of Renaissance learning, and
suggests how these and other principles of natural philosophy informed
common rules for interpreting the images and narratives of dreams. Schemes
for the discernment of natural, demonic and divine dreams are explored from
within the formulas of Catholic and Protestant theology and occult systems of
magic. From a variety of texts explored in this thesis, I sketch a general
framework for the interpretation of dreams in early modern intellectual culture.
This proceeded from the basis, established in chapter two, that natural and
divine species of vision could be productively compared based upon sensory
criteria. There was an expectation that genuinely divine visions would fulfil or
supersede the norms of natural vision, as contrasted with the chaos and
degeneration of natural dreams. This standard of clear and intelligible vision
was related to the order of thoughts in the mind, which reflected their origins
within or outside of the cosmic order. The order of thought or mental concepts
in dreams—expressed through images rather than language—was proved first
through experience, but in the second instance by their intelligibility to the
soul’s understanding. This consisted in an ability to perceive the underlying
logic that dream signs represented, whether this knowledge came by
enlightenment or through discursive arts of interpretation. The ultimate proof
of their origins and their putative truth was the passions which a dream or
vision generated, since the value of perceived knowledge was its ability to move
the spiritual will rather than the carnal appetites. The theory of dream
interpretation depended not only upon the logic by which dream symbols were
generated and operated, but how their mental impressions affected the
cognitive powers of the soul.
The Emblematic World View and its Decline
The symbolic system of thought which informed European views of the natural
world and its religious and philosophical significance has often been described
by historians principally through its alien sentiments about what constituted
‘knowledge worth knowing’. The late seventeenth century experienced a
watershed with the rising regard for texts of natural history and experimental
9 Ashworth, ‘Natural History and the Emblematic World View’, pp. 318—324.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
161
demonstration which restricted their account of animals and natural objects to
purely anatomical and material properties. Prior to this, it was conventional
and expected that textbooks and encyclopaedias designed to inform and
educate would encompass a vast amount of additional knowledge which would
be considered to occupy another intellectual space in our own day, that of the
humanities. Depending on the length and sophistication of the work, an
encyclopaedic entry could include every name a creature was known by,
‘Hononymous and Synonymous words’, natural similitudes, lists of sympathies
and antipathies, references and representations in literature, mythology,
antiquities, hieroglyphic forms, emblems and devices, morals, fables,
epigrammes and adages, and scriptural exegesis.10 To know anything about the
natural world was to know the totality of its associations and connections in the
cosmic order, and thereby to perceive its overall significance in God’s
purposeful creation. Interpretive values were not mere human constructions
imposed on a disinterested physical world, but woven into the fabric of the
physical world. Physical attributes and properties existed for the purpose of
expressing spiritual meanings, and hermeneutic methods of ‘reading’
metaphors, analogies, and homologies into natural phenomena were not artistic
constructions but legitimate tools of intellectual enquiry.11
This view of the world rested on certain metaphysical and epistemological
assumptions. The first was that matter and spirit were connatural: things were
simultaneously physical and spiritual. This was more than a structural
principle, the Aristotelian idea that spirit gives form to matter. It expressed the
originally Platonic principle that spiritual things existed in the realm of ultimate
ideas, the highest virtues and values. Material existence therefore mirrored and
embodied transcendent truths, and these truths were attributes of God. The
second was that the truths embodied by the natural world were not singular but
multi-vocal – they were part of a greater whole which expressed many truths,
and did so by virtue of their interrelation, their interaction and their capacity
for dynamic change. The properties of a natural object were like the facets of a
single jewel, which mirrored and reflected other nodes in the cosmic web, and
which endlessly refracted the overall image and animating light of God. The
third assumption was that there was a hierarchical order in creation, so that
certain objects mirrored and expressed spiritual ideas more clearly than others.
This doctrine, the chain of being, was similarly reproduced throughout the
cosmic order. It dictated a hierarchy of created things, ascending from
inanimate things to plants, to animals, to humans, and then to the angels and
God himself. It differentiated corrupt and noble forms and properties in nature.
10
Ibid. 11
Ashworth, ‘Natural History and the Emblematic World View’; Harrison, pp. 34—56.
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
162
It also governed the expression of knowledge, so that linguistic expression was
often assumed superior to the communicative power of images.12
The final key assumption was that spiritual truth was hidden in the patterns of
scripture and the patterns of nature, and that the sum of humanity’s knowledge
reflected its limited understanding of both. Harrison argued that the major
episteme shifts in the western intellectual tradition from late antiquity to the
seventeenth century, were based in no small part on changing attitudes to how
the symbolic language of the bible was assumed to be rooted in the physical
world, and thus how God, Nature and Scripture reflected each other. In the
early Christian world, the church’s hermeneutic work was primarily ‘vertical’ in
its references: the symbols of scripture and the objects of nature were explained
primarily in terms of the spiritual truths which they represented.13 As the
intellectual traditions of the medieval church grew in sophistication, and gained
increasing access to the recovered texts of antiquity, ambitions grew to map the
intricate interrelationship of the natural world, in the hope that comprehending
its order would bring spiritual clarity and restore man’s own harmonious
relationship with the world. This engendered the study of ‘horizontal’
references—the sum of the vast network of similitudes, associations, allegories
and representations which we have described as the ‘emblematical’ view of
nature.14 This way of seeing the world began to decline only after the
Reformation. Harrison identifies the Protestant determination to reduce
interpretation of scripture to its ‘literal’ sense, and its anxiety to off-set the
corrupting influence of human fancy, as key driving forces behind the tendency
of Protestant thinkers to ‘instrumentalize’ nature, to increasingly interpret the
bible through historical and chronological rather than symbolic schemas, and to
adopt the mechanical and mathematical views of nature propounded by Bacon
and the Cartesians.15
The gradual erosion of the emblematic world view over the course of the
sixteenth century occurred as new approaches to the study of the natural world
became increasingly articulate. Divine purpose was sought in nature, but the
search increasingly moved away from seeing the world as a system and a
network of signs.16 In a reversal of the growing density of the symbolic world
over the medieval period, the symbolic and analogical language of scripture
became increasingly stripped down and isolated. Though they still played a role
in transmitting intimations of the divine to the human mind, this scriptural
12
Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, pp. 234—273; Cocking, Imagination: A Study, pp. 1—89; Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, pp. 99—145; Clark, Thinking with Demons, 31—79.
13 Harrison, The Rise of Natural Science, pp. 11—33.
14 Ibid., pp. 34—63.
15 Ibid., pp. 64—265.
16 Harrison, The Rise of Natural Science, pp. 64—204.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
163
language was no longer reflected generally in the order of nature. Poetic,
allegorical and analogical logic was still used to detect God’s intentions and
ends in nature, but this did not amount to the same sharing of essences and
sympathetic connections assumed to exist in medieval and Renaissance
culture.17 The metaphorical value of scripture was reframed according to its
utility as a method of communication, rather than an expression of natures.
Study of the Bible in Protestant England increasingly focused on its literal and
historical sense, with the ‘types’ and ‘antitypes’ of Scripture being read as
historical manifestations of God’s providential purpose.18 Most of the dream
symbols and the metaphysical principles they relied upon were rooted in the
peripatetic and Neoplatonic view of nature: the underlying logic that drove
them, consequently, was contested. This did not, however, mean that that the
emblematic view of the world had died out. Though it no longer dominated the
intellectual scene, many continued to talk of similitudes and their occult powers.
And while the semiotic and symbolic values that underpinned many techniques
of dream interpretation were being challenged, discussions in philosophy of
mind based around the mimetic, vitalistic or kinetic forces which shaped the
impressions of the senses, imagination and intellectual mind, were still of
central importance.
Visual and Cognitive Order in the Perception of Dreams Opinion was always divided on the implications of the idea that physical and
spiritual reality were connatural, and how divine power and knowledge were
mediated in such a universe. The belief that the physical and material world
were parallel supported the idea that material forms and practices were a
gateway to perceiving the divine. However this world of essences was also
hierarchical. The material world was crucially marred by imperfection and
corruption, and many believed it acted as an impediment and a distraction from
the higher truths. It was possible to disagree over which methods were most
legitimate or effective for extracting knowledge from such a world.19 The Greek
philosophers were divided over whether the highest form of knowledge could
be achieved through discursive or theurgic methods.20 The same tensions were
apparent in Christian thought and religion, where the virtue of sacramental
participation was pitted against fears that the laity did not understand the
Gospels, and that false belief misplaced worship from God onto nature.
Peripatetic scholars and mystical contemplatives recreated the divisions
17
Ibi.d, pp. 161—204. 18
Ibid., pp. 107—120. 19
Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp.52—53; Cocking, Imagination: A Study, pp.90—100, 141—167; Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, pp. 16—48. 20
I.e., intellectual or religious. See Edward Moore, ‘Neoplatonism’, Ver. May 2, 2005, on Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, [http://www.iep.utm.edu/neoplato/#SH3b, accessed 12 Nov 2013].
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
164
between discursive, theurgic and apothatic forms of knowing in the medieval
Church. This was seen in the divisions between the Neoplatonic mysticism of
the Pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaventure, whose teaching inspired the Franciscan
order, and those like Aquinas, who rejected core tenets of Neoplatonism and
asserted the sufficiency of man’s reason to apprehend his place within God’s
creation.21 This problem continued to play itself out within Protestant religion,
even after its repudiation of sacramental theology and materialistic forms of
worship, in the continued struggles over the depth and extent of Church reform,
the liberty of religious conscience, and in differing attitudes toward the use of
the imagination in prayer and meditation.
These epistemological concerns, which often involved intricate and
sophisticated discussions about how human beings perceived and understood
the world, had a direct bearing on the way in which the images or ‘objects’ of
dreams were thought to relate to the rest of human knowledge, and either defy
or signify higher meanings. Their visual nature embodied some of the central
ambiguities of the symbolic and hierarchical world view. Aristotelian
philosophy dictated that the mind was dependent upon the images presented
by the senses for the spiritual forms that subsequently formed the matter of
thought.22 The thoughts of the mind, too, were often grounded in the
representations and images of the imagination. In arts of memory, utilised by
the learned to store and retrieve knowledge in an efficient manner, thoughts
were encoded in visual forms or emblems.23 In Locke’s later epistemology,
which rejected speculation on the existence of occult ‘spiritual forms’, the
equivalence between imaginative phantasms and the matter constitutive of
thought may have been even greater, so there was little distinction between the
operations of imagination, memory and intellect.24
At times, mental images appeared to offer routes to knowledge that were
beyond the immediate grasp of the intellect. The belief that reason was the
highest road to attaining knowledge was countered by the view that human
reason was incapable of grasping divine truths. This made it necessary for God
to communicate such truths by way of metaphor and analogy, with the symbolic
language of scripture and the prophetic writings it encoded as the principal
example of this. Francis Bacon noted that ‘in matters of Faith and Religion, we
raise our Imagination above our Reason; which is the cause why Religion
21
Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, pp. 234—273. 22
Ayers, ‘The Cognitive Faculties’, p. 954—961. 23
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, (Chicago, 1966); Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, (trans.) Stephen Clucas, (Chicago, 2000), pp. 1—80; Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 31—51. 24
Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, pp. 44—48.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
165
sought ever access to the mind by similitude, types, parables, visions, dreams’.25
The idea that images might mediate higher truths was particularly prevalent
within Platonic, Neoplatonic and mystical belief systems, where the imaginative
and mental world was elided with the realm of ‘celestial’ forms and beings,
which occupied a higher point in the cosmic structure than terrestrial forms.
Thinkers like Aquinas and Casaubon asserted the superiority of discursive
reason against such contemplative models of knowledge.26 But the very fact
that the Bible itself was full of symbolic language explained why it was
necessary to defend the possibility of visual mediation in dreams, and why
elements of Neoplatonic thought remained relevant to Protestant thinkers like
John Smith. Smith called prophetic revelation as revealed in Scripture an
'Analogical way' by which 'the knowledge of Divine Truth may also be revealed
to us'.27 For Protestants, Scriptural figures and analogies were not naturally
allegorical so much as a direct form of substitution or code for the mind of God,
which was 'debasing it self to assume our rude conceptions', and 'content, when
it comes into the world, to wear our mantles, to learn our language, to conform
it self as it were to our dress and fashions'28. As sensible and analogical images,
prophecy might present hell 'as a great valley of fire like that of Hinnom', heaven
' as a place of continual banqueting' or God 'as riding upon the wings of the Wind,
riding upon the Clouds, sitting in Heaven, and the like'.29 For Protestants who
founded their ideas on the idea that the sense of Scripture was literal and not
primarily poetic and allegorical, these instances of visual and symbolic coding
were termed ‘accommodation’.30
Others believed that visual symbols might communicate spiritual ideas
immediately to the understanding, and could in fact constitute a pre-linguistic
communication that was superior to conventional linguistic expression.31
Images thus had the power to express and make manifest ideas which were
spiritual and intellectual. The artistic culture of the Renaissance engaged with
the idea that nature could be imitated in such a way as to express more clearly
the spiritual realities that lay beneath it. The Tuscan painter Cennino Cennini
(ca. 1370 – ca. 1440) expressed the purpose of the artist as being ‘ to discover
things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to
fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist’.32
25
Francis Bacon, The tvvoo bookes of Francis Bacon, of the proficience and aduancement of learning, diuine and humane (London, 1605), p. 47.
26 Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, pp. 128—129.
27 Smith, Select Discourses, 170.
28 Smith, Select Discourses, p. 172.
29 Smith, Select Discourses, pp. 174—175.
30 Harrison, The Rise of Natural Science, pp. 129—137.
31 Ashworth, ‘Natural History and the Emblematic World View’, p. 307.
32 Cennini, Cennino, The craftsman's handbook: the Italian "l libro dell'arte", (trans.) Daniel V.
Thompson, (New York Dover, 1954), p. 1.
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
166
As the arts of sculpture and painting were related to the ideal of ‘picturing’
reality but also transcending it, so too there developed a symbolic culture of the
‘emblem’, a reified form of pictoral representation which absorbed many visual
motifs—including allegorical figures, hieroglyphic and heraldic symbolism,
elements of portraiture and decorative art and printing—but was increasingly
considered a didactic kind of form within which the power of similitudes was
manifested.
In seventeenth-century England emblematic images spread through the
publishing of ‘emblem books’, and were presented as a tool of moral and
spiritual reflection. The didactic potential of emblems drew upon the traditions
of Christian meditation which evolved from the mystical and Neoplatonist
traditions of the medieval church. Their multi-vocal forms acted upon by the
sensible, imaginative and intellectual powers of the soul, and penetrating these
layers of meaning, raised the perceptions of the soul toward heaven.33 Similar
ideas related studies in ancient arts of memory consolidation to the pursuit of a
universal system for uniting human knowledge and comprehending the divine
order, which might take the form of a distinctive system of organization, a
‘universal’ hieroglyph, or an Adamic language whose characters resembled
simply what they were supposed to represent. 34 Emblems were often identified
as precisely the kind of symbolic form which would be stored in a mnemonic
system.35 The popularity and intellectual significance of the emblem was
displayed in claims that God himself had designed parts of creation in the form
of an emblem (or impresa), and the tendency to present key biblical episodes as
emblematic—including, as we shall see, the images of divine dreams.36
Notions about the relationship of images and ideas such as these meant that the
structural and organisational characteristics of dreams could be related to
order in the processes of human cognition. It was notable that discussions
about the origins of natural, demonic and divine dreams often referred to their
qualities as expressing disorder or order in the realm of cognition. The preacher
Richard Allestree said that in dreams ‘Ideas are not always well connected,
there is no chain or thred of fancies, and the thoughts are not joynted regular
and even’ but instead there was ‘breaches and disorder in them still, the Images
of sleep being like Nebuchadnezzar's, made of such things as do not well
unite’.37 Nashe called dreams a ‘figure of the first Chaos whereout the world
was extraught’ in which ‘cogitations runne on heapes like men to part a fray,
33
Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 160—232. 34
Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, pp. 97—194; 35
Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 48—51. 36
Ibid., pp. 151—152; 168—177. 37
Richard Allestree, Forty sermons whereof twenty one are now first publish'd (London, 1684), p. 26.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
167
where euerie one strikes his next fellow’.38 Locke believed them to be ‘all made
up of the waking Man's Ideas, though, for the most part, oddly put together’, and
in a way ‘little conformable to the Perfection and Order of a rational Being’.39 In
his Neoplatonic account Philip Goodwin distinguished between dreams in
which ‘Reason acts irregularly, intricately, inconsistently, fluctuating and roving
up and down, that things hang (as we say) like ropes of sand’, and those where
‘Reason acts more regularly, and manages matters more methodically, so that
sometimes Men may finde as effectuall use of Reason in their sleep as when
wide awake.’40 In Goodwin’s typology, demonic dreams were associated with
the former, and the divine with the latter. In humanity’s vain dreams there was
‘drunken changes of things, nothing solid or serious, nothing fixed or firm, but
empty shadows of things scattered, that dispersing pass away.’41 Demonic
dreams were ‘full of inconsistencies, lubricities, slippery, severed and unsetled,
rushings in and rollings about, Reason so roving from one thing to another, that
the minde makes miserable non-sence’.42 In contrast to both, divine dreams
would
make a more orderly entrance, and leave a more legible Impress:
Thoughts herein as adhering one to another, so declaring one of
another. As bringing in things more leisurely, so making of things more
intelligible, more evident and easie to be understood.43
These descriptions pertained to the quality of thoughts during sleep, but it is
evident that when dreams were described in this way, it was implicit either that
the images themselves were being presented as manifestations of thought, as
‘visible conceits’, or else that their visual order and pattern provided the
foundation for rational judgment. The presence of a visual order in these
representations is signalled when commentators turn to the dominant symbolic
and artistic forms of their culture in order to express their quality. Aquinas
stated that the different degrees of prophetic vision could be distinguished
‘according to the expressiveness of the imaginary signs’, which included the
analogical and metaphorical figures of ‘the seven full ears of corn’ and ‘the
burning of the city under the figure of a boiling cauldron’ in the visions of
Joseph and Jeremiah respectively.44 John Smith called prophetic inspiration ‘this
glassing of Divine things by Hieroglyphicks and Emblems in the Fansie’.45 Philip
38
Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, di. 12. 39
Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, p. 42. 40
Philip Goodwin, The Mystery of Dreames, p. 5—6. 41
Ibid.,, p. 156. 42
Ibid., p. 43. 43
Ibid., p 43—44 44
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, Q.174, Art. 3. 45
Smith, Select Discourses, p. 182.
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
168
Goodwin believed that the images of dreams reflected the divine potential in
man, and as such, necessarily reflected God back to him:
In an Image there is not onely a resemblance, Analogie or similitude of one
thing to another, but there is a Deduction, derivation, impression of that
similitude upon the one, from the other, with relation thereunto. Now as man
that hath Dreames in him; so there be Dreames in man, upon which is such an
Impresse of the similitude of God, such cleer Characters of Gods Image
Imprinted, as proves them to proceed from God.46
In Beale’s treatise the symbolic dreams of the Pharoah’s butler, Jacob’s
wrestling match with the angel (which he judged to have taken place in a
dream), Paul’s vision of the Macedonian, and Peter’s vision of the blanket
descending from heaven were all called an ‘Embleme’ which bore an ‘individuall
marke of pertinency’ and sometimes a ‘latent’ sense that required spiritual
interpretation.47 Amyraut claimed that the images of divine dreams were ‘so
admirably composed, that they seem to be the result of a very intelligent
Cause’.48 This was evident because natural dreams were neither:
so emblematical on the one side, or so regular on the other, as to present, in
their very constitutions, Symbols consisting of so many parts, which answer
one another with so great proportion.49
John Owen described how the prophet Ezekial, received ‘a Vision by way of
Representation unto his Mind of a Glorious Fabrick of a Temple, to instruct the
Church in the Spiritual Glory and Beauty of Gospel-Worship’.50 This temple
appeared to reflect the highest imaginable aspirations of Renaissance
architectural theory, with its emphasis on rationalized spaces and forms which
imitated the perfection of the divine order, as well as the mythological belief
that structures described in the Old Testament were built according to God’s
command and expressed spiritual truths in their measurements, proportions
and form.51 Owen claimed that it was ‘utterly impossible for the Mind of Man to
conceive and retain at once all the Harmonious Structure, Dimensions, and Laws
of the Fabrick represented’ in Ezekial’s vision, so that its origins and
memorability could only be a divine effect.52
46
Philip Goodwin, The Mystery of Dreames, pp. 318—319. 47
Beale, ‘Treatise on the Art of Interpreting Dreams’, 25/19, 17b—18a in HP. 48
Amyraut, Divine Dreams Mention’d in Scripture, p. 62. 49
Ibid., p. 90. 50
Owen, Pneumatologia, p. 109. 51
Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, pp. 160—167; Jim Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: The Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1998), pp. 9—11.
52 Ibid.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
169
Divine dreams were discerned then by their ability to fulfil, often in fact to
surpass, the teleological function of the human organism, so that its perceptive
and cognitive faculties functioned at heightened capacity. In the Thomistic
formulation, they were a direct contrast to the confused perceptions and elided
judgments in natural dreams, since divine motions stimulated the inner senses
and provided ordered and intelligible perceptions upon which the mind could
reliably work. Consciousness was created when the soul was taken up into a
supernatural reality. For the Neoplatonist, spiritual dreams came about when
the turbulent motions of the mind and body were suppressed, freeing the soul’s
native spiritual perceptions. When these states of higher vision were achieved,
they were commonly contrasted to natural dreams by a superabundance of
vitalistic energy, from which their supernatural origins could be deduced. This
energy was described principally in terms of illumination, energy and motion.
John Smith derived a hierarchy of prophetic dream types from Jewish scholars
which was based on how strongly the imaginative and intellectual faculties
were moved by a divine force. It was ‘the strength of its impression and the
forcibleness of its operation’ that enabled the prophet to discern a ‘Prophetical
dream’.53 Sensory phenomena in dreams were imbued with power which
imparted ‘a strong evidence of their Original along with them, whereby they
might be able to distinguish them both from any hallucination.’54 Thus God’s
voice, ‘accompanied by ‘Thunder and Earthquake or some great Clashing’, and
equivalent sensual signs, constituted sensory evidence of the spiritual
illumination that ‘entred upon the Mind as a fire, and like a hammer that
breaketh the rock in pieces.’55 The emblems of divine dreams, said Amyraut
were not only ‘distinct and articulate’, but also ‘vely, clear, deeply impress'd
upon the imagination’.56 God’s vitalistic presence in a dream brought clarity and
illumination to its figures. This was associated both with the clarity of the
imaginative vision, but also with the illumination of the soul’s intellectual
faculties. Goodwin said that a majority of dreams were ‘of a darke nature: so
vailed and covered, as they commonly require an Interpreter’, while in demonic
dreams ‘thoughts throng in and thrust out with violence and force, so that
thereby reason is oft darkened, brain distempered and powers disturbed’. 57
Likewise, Amyraut called demonic dreams ‘perplex’d and intricate’, but found
that dreams related in Scripture were ‘not only clear, but full of light, whether
we consider them whole, or in their parts’.58
53
Smith, Select Discourses, pp. 203—209, quoted p. 208. 54
Ibid., p. 206. 55
Ibid., p. 207, 204. 56
Amyraut, Divine Dreams Mention’d in Scripture p. 90. 57
Philip Goodwin, The Mystery of Dreames, di.8, p. 43. 58
Amyraut, Divine Dreams Mention’d in Scripture, p. 63.
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170
This vitalism was notable for tell-tale effects on the cognitive as well as the
perceptual faculties, and accorded with the mimetic nature of early modern
epistemology, that knowledge consisted in successfully mirroring the form,
order and motion of divine essences. The authority and stability of that
knowledge was signalled by the power of consolidation that it wrought on the
memory. Natural dreams were famously difficult to recall, a fact commonly
attributed to their status as weak echoes of waking impressions, or to the
corrupting effects of the body on memory. By contrast, divine dreams were
notable for leaving, as Goodwin had said ‘a more legible Impress’, an effect
seemingly connected both to their logical pattern and vitalistic force. Their
memorability aided their intellectual interpretation: ‘If some things at first seem
intricate,’ Goodwin said, ‘yet the longer the mind dilates thereon, the more it
understands… and the more it apprehends of Gods mind thereby.’59 William
Perkins claimed a sleeping trance was necessary to prophetic vision, because it
gave the mind best opportunity ‘to attend and marke, to know and vnderstand’,
and because this singular attention was conducive to ‘imprint deeper in
memorie things reuealed’.60 Amyraut noted that ‘natural dreams do make so
little impression upon our Spirits, that for the most part, we do not remember
them when we are awake; whereas the Divine are firmly fix'd in our memory’.61
Defending the prophetic credentials of Christopher Kotterus and Christina
Poniatowska, Comenius noted they ‘could remember to a word (before they
were committed to writing) what they had seen and heard, if asked a thousand
times, not changing a very tittle’.62 This state of hypostatic knowledge formed
the basis for the epistemic certainty of the prophet, a notion to which we shall
return in the last section when we explore the effects of dreams on the
dreamer’s agency.
The notion of a hierarchy of prophetic and visionary experience in dreams was
a persistent feature in medieval scholarship, and had its origins in the
Neoplatonic sources on dreams which they adopted and interpreted.63 The
evidence shows that this notion continued to inform the assumptions of
Protestant writers in seventeenth-century England. Even as the dominance of
Aristotelian philosophy came to a decisive end, discussions of the perceptual
and cognitive qualities of dreams continued to define them against a normative
conception of human vision. A divine dream was in part miraculous precisely
because it recreated, and possibly even enhanced, the norms associated with
vision, in what was the ordinarily chaotic circumstances of a dream. If dreams
were at this point being thought in terms of cognitive rather perceptive space,
59
Philip Goodwin, The Mystery of Dreames, p. 44. 60
Perkins, Lectures upon the first three chapters of Revelation (1605), p. 73. 61
Amyraut, Divine Dreams Mention’d in Scripture, p. 63. 62
Comenius, A Generall Table of Europe, p. 190. 63
Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages , pp. 17—34, 83—112.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
171
then it is notable that the intervention of a prophetic dream recreated the
perceptual dynamic. On the other hand, Goodwin’s endorsement of divine
dreams as a feature of the sanctified imagination problematizes such a
distinction in a world where every-day thought was an essential reflection or
‘similitude’ of a divine or demonic influence. The presence of visual forms in the
mind was said to support the cognitive acts of perception and of judgment, and
it was the divine agent that invested dreams with the power to stimulate those
motions. The vitalistic force which implanted these images was not, however,
sufficient to describe how they were received, perceived and understood by the
soul.
The Interpretation of Dreams Dreams had their various interpretations whether or not their origins were
divine. The visual forms of dreams (known variously as impression, phantasms,
similitudes, species) were mental objects, but possessed the same multi-vocal
nature as the material forms they copied. They were subject to the same
methods of interpretation, and were generated, moved and manipulated by
many of the same causal forces assumed to operate in nature. In the first
chapter, we saw that natural dreams could be conceived of as basically
elemental in their nature, expressing the qualities and properties of the bodily
humours, and impregnated by other natural accidents, including the thick airs
of the climate and the celestial irradiations of the stars. In these instances, the
signs and symbols of dreams were caused by an occult power of sympathy
between these natural substances and the images suspended in the imagination
or stored in the memory. At other times, the images of dreams appear to have
been projected and conjured by the imagination according to the reactive and
attractive powers of the appetites, which involved a spiritual but bodily power
of the soul. In contemplative or intellectual dreams, the power of the
imagination might be directed by reason in drawing upon images from the
memory. Supernatural intelligences, demonic, celestial or angelic, similarly
possessed the power to manipulate any impression, phantasm or similitude
pre-existing in the body. The only force in nature which could implant totally
original and never-before seen forms or ‘species’ was God himself.64
Understanding of dreams could be achieved either by inspiration or by human
arts. In the former case, the divine motions which impressed and illuminated
the imagination also, to varying degrees, illuminated the soul’s power of reason
so that it was able to penetrate the visionary forms and see their spiritual
meaning. John Smith observed from his Jewish sources that in the lowest
64
Aquinas, II.II, Q.173, Art. 2.
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172
degree of prophecy the imaginative power was stronger, disturbing the rational
senses so that they saw only ‘Parables, Similitudes and Allegories, in a dark and
obscure manner’ and perceive ‘not a Literal but Allegorical truth contained in
them’.65 In the second degree of prophecy the strength of the imaginative and
rational powers would ‘equally balance one another’.66 In the third the rational
power was stronger, and ‘the Minde of the Prophet is able to strip those things
that are represented to it in the glass of Phansie of all their materiality and
sensible nature, and apprehend them more distinctly in their own naked
Essence’.67 This meant that his prophetic expositions would ‘prove distinct and
clear, and free from all obscuritie, having a literal truth in them’.68 Higher than all
of these was prophecy of the ‘gradus Mosaicus’, in which ‘all Imagination
ceaseth, & the Representation of Truth descends not so low as the Imaginative
part, but is made in the highest stage of Reason and Understanding’. The idea
that the meaning of divine dreams would be clear and transparent was common
in Christian literature on their discernment and interpretation. It was obviously
a concomitant of the idea that divine dreams had a rational order and clear
force, accompanied here by the sense that they possessed a clear thrust and an
apparent meaning. William Perkins claimed that divine dreams ‘be alwaies
either plaine and manifest, or if they be obscure, yet they haue a most euident
interpretation annexed vnto them’.69 As demonic dreams were obscure, ‘the
interpretation of them is ambiguous and vncertaine’, because Satan’s limited
powers of prediction constrained him ‘to giue doubtfull answers by dreames’.70
Nigel Smith notes how Arise Evans called his visions ‘so plaine… they need no
interpretation’; and that Tryon described dreams composed of ‘Forms and
Figures represented, with the Interpretations thereof’. As Philip Goodwin said,
divine dreams were ‘more intelligible, more evident and easie to be understood’.
Higher visions penetrated the symbolic veil of nature, granting the soul divine
insight into their meanings, and also obviating the need for flawed human arts
of interpretation. The meaning of holy dreams was revealed to Joseph and
David rather than discerned. Interpretations were sometimes conferred within
the dream by a divine voice or a figure which fulfilled the role of interpreter or
guide, such as the angelic figures in Daniel’s dreams and John’s revelations. This
signified that human reason was receptive of divine intelligence, exercising no
autonomous perspective, but that which it was granted.
That the origin of a dream was plainly divine was attributed to several factors
by seventeenth-century theologians. Most of these were related to the
65
Smith, Select Discourses, p. 179. 66
Smith does not elaborate on how this would affect the perception or interpretation of the prophet. Smith, Select Discourses, p. 180.
67 Smith, Select Discourses, p. 180.
68 Ibid., p. 180.
69 Perkins, Damned Art of Witchcraft, p.101.
70 Ibid., p. 101.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
173
knowledge that the dream conferred, which was supernatural, and thus beyond
the power of natural and demonic dreams to represent successfully. Perkins
argued that divine dreams ‘haue alwaies had their preeminence aboue others’,
because they concerned ‘the weightiest matters in the world; as the comming
and exhibiting of the Messias, the changes and alterations of Kingdomes, the
reueiling of Antichrist, & the state of the Church of God’.71 Diabolical dreams
were ‘not of so waightie matters, nor so hard to foretell’.72 It was possible to
establish if the message of a dream was genuinely divine because it would
accord with the conventions of church doctrine, since a dream from God ‘is
alwaies agreeable to his reuealed will’, without any deviation ‘in whole or in
part’. Natural dreams tended to be ‘agreeable to mans corruption, which is
repugnant vnto Gods will’.73 These prescriptions signaled the conformity of
divine dreams to revealed religion and morality. Amyraut, however, stressed
the miraculous nature of the signs in a divine dream, which he believed to be
above man’s own inventive capacity, and represented things ‘so far above that
which natural causes are accustomed to do, that it would be too great an
impertinence to impute it to them’. Philip Goodwin followed the method of
discerning differences ‘as the Learned lay down between true Miracles
and false’.74 By this account:
true Dreames in a direct line lead to the glorification of God in the good of men,
and to the edification of men, in the matters of God. But false Dreames,
their drift is, to draw the Souls of men aside to such acts as are dishonourable
to God, disagreeing to his Word, and disadvantagious towards mens eternall
good.75
The ideal that dreams should bear a worthy meaning even penetrated into the
realm of secular manners. The Galateo, a Spanish courtier’s handbook, warned
that ‘we must not trouble men with so base and absurde matter as dreames bee:
especially suche foolyshe things, as most tymes men haue’.76 An exception was
to be made for dreams full of ‘deepe knowledge and vndersta[n]ding’, which
were not the preserve of common men.77
Illumination was usually a means to interpretation only within the context of a
prophetic ecstasy. If the intellect was not wholly illuminated, or the origins of
the dream was not immediately from God, then interpretation had to proceed
71
Ibid., p. 100—101. 72
Ibid., p. 101. 73
Ibid., 102—103 74
Philip Goodwin, The Mystery of Dreames, p. 47. 75
Ibid., pp. 47—48. 76
Giovanni Della Casa, Galateo of Maister Iohn Della Casa, Archebishop of Beneuenta, (London, 1576), pp. 33—32.
77 Della Casa, Galateo, pp. 33—32
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
174
by way of human art and wisdom, as in those lowest degrees of prophecy
described by Jewish philosophers. Chapter two high-lighted that attempts to
extract supernatural truths from nature was always controversial. People also
searched for different kinds of knowledge in dreams. Physicians who restricted
their divinatory speculations to the natural causes of diseases, for instance,
were looked upon without concern by the Church: this was a lawful form of
deduction and conjecture. Those, however, who sought knowledge from
dreams beyond the immediate significance of bodily passions, usually in
relation to the future, practised a form of divination which was condemned in
much Protestant moral literature. As chapter two suggests, this did not prevent
many from pursuing what they deemed to be legitimate studies of the signifying
power of dreams. The art of interpretation was applied to the materials of
Scripture by millenialists seeking to understand the end times, theosophists
perceived the divine through metaphors, analogies and emblematic visions,
while puritan experientialists and philosophers dabbling in the occult sought
experimental knowledge outside of the moral proscriptions which they saw as
aligned with discredited Aristotelian philosophy.
One of the most common contexts in which to interpret dreams was medicine,
and in examining the practices of physicians, and later the occult oneirocritic,
we observe how dreams were thought to be caused by physical laws in
Aristotelian physics or occult theories of magic. In Aristotle’s physics, the world
was composed from prime matter, which was conditioned and differentiated by
a set of qualities, the binary opposites of hot/cold and dry/moist. Their
combinations produced the four elements of earth, water, air and fire. All
material things were variously composed of these four basic substances, so that
the world was made of ‘mixed substances’. All things in the cosmos thus
composed ‘wholes’ created from opposing qualities and elements. These
substances were subject to four different kinds of change: substantial,
qualitative, quantitative and locomotive. The most complex of these were
changes of substance and quality (sometimes referred to as corruption and
generation) and changes of place (locomotive, which gave basic laws of motion).
Changes of substance and quality were best described as a relationship of
potentiality to actuality: all things, as mixed substances, contained within
themselves the ‘potential’ to convert into an opposing form or quality, which
would then be ‘manifest’ or ‘actual’. Changes of place were dictated by
Aristotle’s conclusion that all like elements and qualities were naturally
attracted to each other. The world itself was composed of natural ‘places’ for
earth, water, air and fire. The falling of a stone, the flowing of water, or the
rising of steam were not caused by a notion of density: instead, the ordinary
motion of mixed substances tended to bring them back to this natural place,
On the Interpretation of Dreams
175
while unnatural motion was caused when things were moved out of their
natural place.78
While the logic of divination from dream images can often appear arbitrary
when simply asserted, it is important to understand that physicians who
prognosticated on their ‘similitudes’ or ‘resemblances’ were attempting to
relate the dynamics of their images to these fundamental natural laws. Dream
signs were caused by the humours, which as substances were defined by the
four qualities, and by a quantitative equilibrium and natural place in the body:
ill health resulted from changes of substance (corruption), imbalance in the
humours (surfeit and deficit), and by violent motions and agitations. Lemnius
claimed that health could be forecasted by sensing the disposition of the body
and its dominant humours, because the ‘the causes and original beginninges’ of
changes in health ‘proceede oute of the body’, and were ‘wythin the compasse
and reason of thinges naturall’.79 Thomas Hill claimed that dreams would
‘signifye euill, when the spirites and heate renewed in the sleepe transpose
them vpon those euill humors, whiche before rested, for asmuch as then
through these the lyke vapours be eleuated and stirred vppe, and these by their
ill nature, cause men to feare’.80
Medical dreams therefore reflected the present state of these humours, and by
this their potential for changes in the body and in health. Galen had said that
the mind in dreams could sense the body ‘weighed down by an excess of
humours’, causing the soul to experience vexation, or it could be ‘light and
unsuperflous’ so that it dreamt of flying or running.81 Lemnius stated that a
dream of ‘dvuinge ouer head and eares in Water, or to be in Bathes & [R]aynes’
might signify an effusion of phlegmatic humour (defined by the qualities of wet
and cold), which might ‘fall out of the head’ into ‘their necke, Iawes, vocall
Arterye and Lunges’. Related images of ‘Hayle, Snow, Yse, storme & Rayne’
could signify whether the humour was ‘thicke and grosse’ or ‘thinne and
liquide’.82 Hill noted that:
dreaminge to walke by narrow places, declarethe a sicknesse to come of the
lunges or lightes, because he is prohibited and letted to breathe or drawe
necessarye or congruente ayre, and the reason wherfore is, because their
passages and wayes be stopped83
78
Grant, Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, pp. 55—62; Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 31—68.
79 Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, p. 120.
80 Hill, The most pleasaunt arte of the interpretation of dreames, p. 38.
81 Galen, ‘On Diagnosis in Dreams’, (trans.) Lee Pearcy,
[http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgajpd/medicina%20antiqua/tr_GalDreams.html, accessed 12 May 13]. 82
Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexion, p. 112—113. 83
Hill, The most pleasaunt arte of the interpretation of dreames, p.39.
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
176
Conditions of quality, and changes of quantity and place were the most common
things to be read into the properties and motions witnessed in dreams. One of
the most powerful and common equivalence was between the body and natural
forms in dreams which signified a state of generation as opposed to corruption,
the predominance of noble and therefore healthy forms and qualities. The
physician James Hart described an ideal dream reverie in which:
to runne apace, and to see the earth plaine and smooth, well manured, planted
with pleasant and fruit full trees, and bearing good store of fruit: as also to see
rivers and fountaines running their accustomed course, and the accustomed
quantity of water, this doth also signifie sound health; and that both meat and
drinke and all excretions keepe a due symmetry and proportion.84
By contrast, bodily illness and disease displayed themselves in scenes that
included poor qualities, lack of equilibrium and displaced order. There might
be ‘rough and uneven earth’, which indicated ‘some corruption in the flesh’;
leaves falling from trees indicating ‘hurt from humiditie and moisture’; while
rivers overflowing signified overabundance of blood, and troubled seas, ‘disease
in the belly’.85 The allegorical content of dreams was not limited to other
natural signs, but could also include human actors, behaviours, and even signs
which were clearly forms of human culture, expanding the symbolic significance
of order to the social world. Armed men near rivers or monstrous apparitions
pointed to ‘great disease or madness’.86 It was good to ‘dreame people
apparelled in white and comely clothes’, but ‘portendeth no good’ to see anyone
naked. A good dream reflected the orderly patterns of human life: ‘to see with a
cleere and sharpe sight such things as are done upon earth… portendeth
health’.87 Lemnius also claimed that healthy dreams displayed ‘onely the
labours, exercises and deuyses of the daye, and the needefull cares for the
dailye mayntenaunce of this life’.88 In the world of health, extraordinary visions
were ominous because they portended changes in the natural order of the body.
Belief in the occult laws of nature extended the connections between dreams
and natural causes in the body to those in the wider world. Beyond changes of
substance, quality and place, occult metaphysics posited the existence of
‘sympathies’ and ‘antipathies’, fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion
which operated on objects according to their similitude or contrariety. Through
astrological theory, occult divination encompassed not just the terrestrial but
the celestial sphere, from which powers and virtues were believed to be
84
Hart, Diet of the Diseased, p. 339. 85
Ibid., p. 339. 86
Ibid., p. 340. 87
Ibid., p. 339. 88
Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, p. 95.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
177
transmitted through the ether and the air to influence the course of nature, the
behaviour of individuals, and the fate of societies. Accordingly, the analogical
and metaphorical images of dreams which revealed the influences of these
celestial agents grew to encompass individual fortune, not just in sickness and
health, but all of one’s social relations and life circumstances. Thomas
Walkington called those dreams ‘Fatall or portentous’ which were
‘prognosticous of either good or badde successe’. 89 In many cases, these
divinatory dreams appeared to draw analogical or homological connections
between natural laws and the course of human fate, emotional, material and
social. Thomas Hill’s reading of the fateful meanings of a dream seems like an
echo of Hart’s medical diagnosis:
[I]in all dremes the more good cyrcu[m]stances there are like as whe[n] they
seeme to be in a pleasa[n]t, fayre, good lye, greene, and fruit fu[ll]place, or in a
Churche, or before [a] frende, and so of the others, so muche the certainer
shalbe the interpretation vpon, prosperitye, and contrarye wyse vppon
infortu~nacye: lyke as to dreame that he seeth himselfe in a barren place,
desert, or rude, or rough wyth stone, or troublesom, pronosticateth euill.90
A manuscript of occult lore, similarly, drew a general law from the Pharoah’s
biblical dream of the lean and fat oxen in Genesis 41:17-20: ‘Concerning
Joseph’s oxen this tenet will be verified that so often you dream of an Ox, so
often the year may be judged, for the nature the Ox is of, the like the year will
prove.’91 Joseph had interpreted the fortunes of the harvests, but in the
manuscript the oxen predicted a man’s poverty, marriage and death. Generally,
however, the grounds on which connections of a similitude and analogy could
be drawn were wide and rarely immediately apparent to a modern interpreter.
This was because in the ‘emblematic’ conception of nature, any shared property
of substance, quality, form, of natural place, or indeed any powers, virtues,
relationships or behaviours arising from them, were grounds for making an
objective and possibly occultic connection between two things. In a world of
opposites, indeed, objects could be connected by principle of opposition to any
of these things. Gail Kern Paster asserts that many contemporaries established
great equivalence between the identity, action and passion of different objects
on the basis of their shared natures, such that, for instance, the passion and
form of melancholy could be drawn out into ‘animals, musical instruments and
sewage ditches’, as a ‘sensible feature of the natural world’.92Dreams therefore
89
Thomas Walkington, The Opticke Glass of Humours, (London, 1607), p. 74. 90
Hill, The most pleasaunt arte of the interpretation of dreames, di. 39. 91
Adam McClean, A Treatise on Angel Magic, (San Francisco, 2006), p. 147. 92
Gail Kern Paster, ‘Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears and Early Modern Cosmology: Reading Shakespeare’s Psychological Materialism across the Species Barrier’ in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia, 2004), p. 120—121.
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
178
encompassed, as Hart’s diagnostic dreams did, variables of social experience,
custom and display, and presented themselves in all manner of symbols, as
parables, allegories or ‘emblems’. Hill wrote that dreams of women with
covered heads and black garments signified intent of deception, which ‘booth
the kynde of them & also the coloure of the garments perswadeth so to be’;
dreams of harlots signified ‘deception or variances’, which were ‘two
propertyes of them [their nature and character]’.93 Walkington observed:
These also are fatall dreames, as when we dreame of Eagles flying ouer our
heade, it portends infortunatenes: to dreame of mariages, dauncing and
banquetting foretels some of our kinsfolkes are departed; to dreame of siluer,
sorrow, if thou hast it gi|uen thy selfe: of gold, good fortune; to loose an axill
tooth or an eye, the death of some speciall friend: to dreame of bloody teeth, the
death of the dreamer: to weep in sleepe, ioy: to contemplate ones face in the
water, and to see the dead, long life: to ha~dle lead, some mela~cholick disease:
to see a Hare, death: to dream of chickins and birds, commonly ill lucke94
Amyraut observed that dreams were usually interpreted according to their
resemblances or similitude, but sometimes by a law of contraries. It was
commonly stated that to dream of a marriage predicted a coming funeral. As a
sceptic, Thomas Nashe recognised the practice of interpreting by similitudes
and contraries, and ridiculed them both, asking ‘what sense is there that the
yoalke of an egge should signifie gold[?]’ or that ‘euery thing must bee
interpreted backward as Witches say their Pater-noster, good being the
character of bad, and bad of good[?]’95 In the case of contraries, it was as if, he
said, ‘men comming from a Play should conclude, Well we haue seene a
Commedie to day, and therefore there cannot choose but be a Tragedie to
morrow’.96 Nashe perceived such laws to be arbitrary, and yet his invocation of
witches is a telling clue to the logic which did underlie such reasoning. Though
less frequently invoked than similitude, essentialist opposition between forms
and qualities could also bring out operational changes in nature, and in occult
theory this displayed itself in the power of ‘antipathies’ which strived to
separate from each other. There are thus two ways in which dreams images
might ‘logically’ display contraries: through sensitivity to present conditions
which contained within themselves the potential for a binary reversal, or a
representation which was stirred up by the operation of an antipathic
connection.
Nashe is an obvious case of a critic who rejected the extent of the occult
connections which others claimed existed between things in the natural world.
93 Hill, The most pleasaunt arte of the interpretation of dreames, di. 40
94 Walkington, Opticke Glass of Humours, 75
95 Nashe, Terrors of the Night, di. 15.
96 Ibid.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
179
He seemed to place more rigid limits on the representational power of mental
images than other contemporaries. A clear instance is when he criticizes
superstitious ‘mumping beldams’ [sic] who would ‘verie soberly affirme, that if
one at supper eate birds, he should dreame of flying; if fish, of swimming; if
venison of hunting, and so for the rest’. It was as if, he said ‘those birds, fish,
and venison beeing dead and disgested, did flie, swim and hold their chase in
their braynes’.97 Yet it is difficult to distinguish just where sobriety begins and
superstition ends in Nashe’s arch satire. He readily affirmed the medical theory
of diagnosis by dreams, and yet how distinct was the principle that waterfalls
expressed phlegm from the idea that flying expressed bird’s flesh? It appeared
to be case of kind and degree – in contrast to the broad attribution of identities
by analogy which Paster detects in early modern culture, Nashe evidently
limited such causation to immediate transmission, since he believed that
‘inflammations of our liuer, or stomack transforme our imaginations to their
analagie and likenesse’.98
The natural power of dream signs, like other occult effects, was not agreed but
contested in early modern culture as a whole. Leading minds of the new
philosophy often reserved harsh criticism for the occult and the emblematic
approach to nature, from Francis Bacon to Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and
Thomas Sprat (bap. 1635, d. 1713).99 William Perkins criticised the arts of
astrology by claiming that celestial causes were too remote to be accurately
discerned, or to have a determinate effect either on nature or the will.100 Others
attributed occult effects or predictions in dreams to demonic counterfeits
intended to lay snares for the soul. Sir John Melton (d.1640) warned against
believing in the ‘negromancers’ who by the assistance of evil spirits could ‘cause
vs [to] dream of gold, or siluer, & we chance to find it instantly, to affirme with
many old women that all dreames are true, for this is but a tricke of the deuill to
bring vs into superstition’.101 Nashe’s attitude toward occult effects and virtues
mirrored that of sceptics who resisted the idea that resemblance and similitude
conferred physical and operational properties. This is evident in his critique of
97 Ibid., di. 20.
98 Ibid., di. 20.
99 Harrison, The Rise of Natural Science, p. 193—204; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, pp.
236—239; Vickers, ‘Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580-1680’ in Brian Vickers (ed.) Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 95—164.
100 William Perkins, An abridgement of the whole body of divinity (London, 1654), pp. 69—74:
‘This Art can not arise from experience, because the same position of all Stars never happen twice, and if they did, yet there could be no observation made of them, because the influencies of the Stars are all confusedly mixt, both in the Air, and in the Earth, even as if all herbs were mingled together in one Vessel.’ For more on religious controversy over astrology as an occult science, see Bernard Capp, English Almanacs 1500-1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (London, 1979), pp. 131—179; Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance: The quarrel about astrology and its influence in England (London, 1966); and in the wider Renaissance, Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life (London, 1983).
101 Sir Thomas Melton, Astrologaster, or, The figure-caster (London, 1620), p. 67.
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180
the ‘imposture’ of physiognomy and psalmistry. Though the body was ‘wrythen
and pleyted’ according to ‘euerie ones labor or exercise’ he believed that in
searching ‘for the minde or disposition, we can no more looke into through [the
palm], than wee can into a looking Glasse through the woodden case thereof.’102
Amyraut was happy to draw upon the wisdom of dream interpretation as he
found it in his sources, but asserted ‘these dreams, which we cannot reasonably
impute either to natural causes, or to meer chance, yet do they not exceed the
power of Angels to convey.’103
For the practitioners of divination, there was no doubt that it was an art proven
through experience and observation. Thomas Hill compared diviners to poets,
‘named naturall prophetes’; they had to detect how a dream could ‘passe by a
small similitude of any matter vnto another lyke’.104 Close reading of Hill’s
treatise is easily frustrated by poor spelling and atrocious syntax, but it is clear
that he related the predictive potential of dreams to Aristotle’s theories of cause
and change, reflecting as he did on the nature of simple and mixed substances,
and the subtle interactions of elements and forces in nature. Hill claimed the
pragmatic skill of the diviner was of equal stature to that of the ‘learned
Phisitio[n]s, sk[i]lfull warriours, weary husbandemen, and polytycke Captains’
who practised their own forms of prognostic conjecture.105 The astrologer
Richard Saunders claimed that dream divination was an act of ‘Prudence’ that
tested the scope and capacity of the intellect. He applied the framework of
phronesis in Aristotelian ethics, an act of practical wisdom which he defined in
terms of its natural function, its object, and its final end, or ultimate excellence,
which was both the glory of God and the private benefit of man.106 Claims about
the instinctive and experiential power of the soul to practise divination usually
depended on the depth of one’s exposure and experience in the art, and to the
training of his memory. Only by such experience, Hill claimed, could one
intuitively discern the natural relationship between signs and causes, according
to one’s spiritual capacity. Agrippa and Casaubon credited prognostic talent to
particularly experienced and prodigious powers of natural memory, while
Saunders advocated for mnemonic devices as an aid to learning in an appendix
to his divinatory works.107 Agrippa drew this theory of interpretation from the
works of Synesius, a Christian Neoplatonist of the 4th century, who commanded
that ‘every one should observe his Dreams, and their events, and such like
102
Nashe, The most pleasaunt arte of the interpretation of dreames, di. 20. 103
Amyraut, Divine Dreams Mention’d in Scripture, p. 23. 104
Hill, The most pleasaunt arte of the interpretation of dreames, di.12—13. 105
Ibid., di. 5. 106
Saunder, Physognomie and Chiromancie, p. 213—215. 107
Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, pp. 131—132; Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, p. 31—36; Saunders, Physognomie and Chiromancie, di. 173—176.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
181
rules’ with the intention to ‘commit to memory all things that are seen, and
accidents that befall, as well in sleep, as watching’.108
Observation of dreams was most often legitimated as an art by locating it within
the practices of astrology, which maintained its reputation amongst a large
section of the educated elite until the late 1650s, and with popular audiences for
a longer time.109 Agrippa claimed that the significance of dreams for public
events could only be known by reference to astrological calculation, the
construction of a horary chart and correlation with other emergent natural
signs. By tracking the position of celestial bodies relative to the earth’s climate,
astrology revealed the disposition and angles of the rays which infused their
virtues into natural objects, including those which caused dreams or enhanced
understanding of them. Astrology was a map of the forces of nature, in which
every particular occurrence, such as a dream, had to be measured against other
propitious and signs and forecasts in order to understand their provenance and
meaning.110 Thus, by understanding the celestial causes of dreams, astrologers
could interpret their signs and conjecture on the possible course of future
events.111 The amateur astrologer Samuel Jeake, interpreted a dream of
November 1678 which included figures of the sun, horses, horsemen and the
signs of zodiac; ‘I was signified by the Sun because he was Lord of the ascendant
in my Nativity’, which ‘portended that I should never be in a Place of Honor or
Authority over others’.112 Dream divination was often placed under the heading
of ‘physiognomy of dreams’ and bundled together with discussion of
physiognomy, chiromancy and metoscopie in divinatory manuals.113 In Richard
Saunder’s book of divination, dream images were given different
interpretations for different complexions in different lunar phases or
astrological houses, and were also attributed to different characters of dreamer
through the art of geomancy.114 The ethereal effusions of dreams were treated
as one more ‘surface’ in which the soul and its stars inscribed their virtues and
108
Ibid., p. 132. 109
Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Cambridge 1989), pp. 19—44; Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, pp. 53—81; Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester, 1995).
110 Agrippa, Occult Philosophy—for divination by dreams see pp. 131—132; with astrological
figures, pp. 323—325. 111
Maggi, In the Company of Demons, pp. 74—82; Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity, pp. 51—59, Cocking, Imagination: A Study, pp. 61—64.
112 Michael Hunter and Annabel Gregory (eds.), An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century:
Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1652-1699 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 143—5, quoted in Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, p. 78.
113 Saunders, Physiognomie and Chiromancie, pp. 201—236; J.S., The true fortune-teller, or, Guide
to knowledge Discovering the whole art of chyromancy, physiognomy, metoposcopy, and astrology, (London, 1698), pp. 100—122.
114 Saunders, Physiognomie and Chiromancie, pp. 201—236 for humoural and astrological
interpretations; pp. 31—37 for the combination of geomancy and chiromantic techniques.
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effects, where they could be observed as a subject for the projections and
speculations of judicial astrologers.
While diviners concentrated on discerning the origins of dream signs, others
focused upon means of understanding their relationship with nature so that
they could promote the necessary conditions to receive significant dreams.
Practitioners of natural magic sought to map the connections between the
terrestrial and celestial realms, and to create practices of ritual magic by which
they could transfer celestial and divine forms of power to the mind. This gave
them the means to achieve by human arts what theologians claimed could be
conferred only by God and angels. The great tables of similitudes and
correspondences recorded in Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy and Aicha’s Magical
Calendar included signs, sigils and emblems related to the virtue of interpreting
dreams, the power of prophecy, and to the numerous spirits believed to have
the power of inspiring dreams. These tables therefore furnished occult means
of causing dreams, while at the same time describing a vast universe of signs
which might conceivably be used to interpret them.115 One of the clearest
examples is the ‘Seal of Daniel’, which in one manuscript was said to confer the
virtue of interpreting dreams, and the ‘Seal of Jeremiah’, which conferred that of
prophecy.116 In at least one source, one of the seals from this table was used as
the fundamental basis of an evocation ritual, as the ‘table of practice’ on which it
was performed.117 Agrippa’s books included talismans which could be used to
attract divine dreams in magical rituals, or to confer upon the mind the power
to correctly understand them.118 The aim of such dreams was usually to gain
more occult knowledge, usually through contact with spirits, and usually either
knowledge of the future or of further occult signs and powers.119 The search for
magical knowledge in the forms of books, figures and characters, contact with
spirits or unspecified secrets often found expression in the dreams of men like
115
These charts were organised according to ascending numerical scale, where different elements and parts of the cosmos were aligned in an unfolding symmetry of resemblances and ascending ontological essences. Not only were the lower and higher terms of these charts in direct relationship, and therefore capable of representing each other, but many furnished explicit symbols, emblems and characters as part of the chain. See Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, pp. 167—343; Johan Babtista Grosschedel von Aicha, The Magical Calendar, (ed.) Adam McClean (Grand Rapids, MI, 1994).
116 The assignment of virtues to these seals is a unique feature of BL manuscript Harl. 3420, 40v-
41r, which otherwise draws Agrippa’s occult tables and copies much of the Magical Calendar. Source: http://www.esotericarchives.com/mc/index.html, accessed 14 Nov 2013].
117 See Sl.3825, fol 116v, [transcription source:
http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/theurgia.htm, accessed 14 Nov 2013]. 118
Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, pp. 314—316 especially; for dreams caused by magical images see pp. 241—242, 300—301, 308.
119 For examples see Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman –
Astrologer, Alchemist, Physician (Oxford, 2005), pp. 54—5, 58—60
On the Interpretation of Dreams
183
John Dee, Simon Forman, William Lilly and Elias Ashmole.120 Similarly,
seventeenth-century alchemists, searching for the philosopher’s stone, often
believed it would confer spiritual powers and virtues. In its most noble form,
that of the ‘angelical’ stone, it would confer the power to converse with angels,
often in the form of divine dreams and visions.121
Contact with spirits was often believed to be the pre-eminent means of gaining
privileged access to divine knowledge. This was true in Jewish theology, in
which God always acted through intermediaries, and in the majority of occult
texts.122 They were the primary vehicles of inspiration throughout Agrippa’s
work, and also the primary means by which the soul was elevated and morally
formed in Thomas Tryon’s mysticism. Spirits formed intimate connections to
the soul through the same occult forces of similitude that united the creatures
and objects of the natural world. The Occult Philosophy claimed that the soul
was attended by as many as three companion spirits or ‘genii’, which formed
and guided his psychic life according to his natural fate, the station and
profession he assumed, and in the ways of religious enlightenment.123 In the
higher forms of magic described by Agrippa, access to divine knowledge clearly
relies on achieving a state of moral worthiness, reflected in the state of the
passionate mind, the purity and cleanliness of the body, and the performance of
charitable and worshipful duties.124 As in all occult operations, the logic behind
these ideas relied on the principal that man in the perfection of his powers and
capacities was a direct similitude of the divine, the image of God, and could take
on more divine powers and attributes as he refined himself into this image.125
For a magician like Agrippa, alignment with God included alignment with nature
and with the heavens, which explained the preponderance of magical arts and
operations by which he could synchronise his physical state, mental powers,
language, even his every posture and gesture to mirror their parts and natures.
Tryon similarly spoke of spirits as intimate familiars, who were attracted by
thoughts, passions and acts which reflected their own nature, and also
influenced the soul in its thoughts. ‘Angels and Genij have power only in their
own respective principles,’ wrote Tryon, ‘and mankind cannot draw neer, nor
have any Communication with them, nor they with him, except he immerseth
120
See Kassell, Medicine and Magic, pp. 58—59, 192—193; Levin, Dreaming the Renaissance, pp. 55—60: Ashmole wrote that when the stars were right Lilly’s dreams ‘may signify some truth, and chiefly may concern things of old’ to do with all the branches of knowledge. Lilly believed Ashmole was ‘so strong in the nativity he has a restless fancy, and therefore dreams of sublime and high matters’.
121Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, pp. 99—100.
122 Smith, Select Discourses, pp. 210—219.
123 Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, pp. 408—412
124 Ibid., pp. 345—556, esp. pp. 492—554.
125 Ibid., pp. 457—464.
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184
his will and desires into their principle.’126 Evil spirits would lead the soul into
depravity, while meditation on the thoughts of angels in dreams would develop
the soul’s virtue. Tryon nowhere endorsed ritual magic, but made prescriptions
for reforming the mind, the passions and the body in order to fit the whole
nature of man to receive divine visions. Many of these mirrored, and may have
been partly drawn from Agrippa’s ideas about the higher kind of metaphysical
magic:
and those that with an Holy Humility do Aspire to this Sublime
Knowledge, Viz. of God, Nature, and Themselves, ought by all means to be in
good earnest, and Zealous for Cleanness and Innocent Living; for Abstinence,
Sobriety and Temperence do wonderfully fortifie the Observers thereof, against
the Assaults and Temptations of Evil Spirits and Angels, and make the Body
Lightsom, Pleasant and Healthy, thereby enlarging all its Functions, and also
Prepares the Soul for Celestial Irradiations, rendring it more fit to become the
Temple of God, and Associate of Holy Powers; those Pure Abstemious Vertues
do in a wonderful, but secret manner attract the good Angels and Spirits127
Occultists, mystics and theologians all had interests in discerning the nature of
spirits when these appeared to manifest themselves in dreams. When this
occurred, they applied methods which had been propounded for discerning the
identity of spirits as they manifested in the physical world. Physical
manifestations of angels and demons were believed to occur in the Bible, and
were commonly accepted, before the growth of sceptical philosophy, to explain
the majority of supernatural visitations and pagan religious experiences
throughout history. The sensual bodies which spirits assumed by manipulating
the physical elements were equivalent in their morphology to the similitudes
they appeared under in dreams. Like the other natural emblems, which
displayed qualities and forms of corruption and generation, of natural or
unnatural place, magnitude or motion, these ‘dream-bodies’ displayed their
identity and position in the cosmic order. Dream-images were inherently truth-
telling by this standard:
Now as the extern Signature of all material Bodies is an intelligible Character,
or Index of the internal Spirit or Vertue, so separated Souls, when they assume
aierial Bodies, or represent themselves in Dreams, do it in Shapes and Figures
Analogous to the state they are in, and that Principle which bears sway over
them.128
Ironically, since man was the highest creature of the visible creation, the
measure of a spirit’s divinity was usually related to the humanity of his
126
Tryon, Dreams & Visions, p.96. 127
Tryon, Dreams & Visions, pp. 101—102. 128
Ibid., p. 123.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
185
appearance. Tryon quoted Trithemius, who said that divine angels would
manifest a human form that denoted ‘their perpetual Youth, Beauty and Vigour’
which all beings in ‘their First, Glorious, and Happy estate’ retained.129 This
form would be masculine—the female body, assumed to be the male’s natural
inferior, was ‘an emblem of weakness’, and unsuited to the essence of angels.130
Nevertheless, it was a Scriptural truth that ‘Angels of darkness might transform
themselves into Angels of light’, casting such appearances into doubt.131
Amyraut believed, however, that such artifices were by necessity imperfect, and
hence discernible to a truly pious interpreter. He believed here was an infallible
mark or character, ‘some Image, which must appear visible, which might
symbolically represent the Angelical Nature’.132 This symbol was imbued with
quality of light or luminescence, ‘something particular in [the image's] lustre
and Majesty’.133 It’s voice, too, would possess ‘something in the tone, and in the
nature of its articulation extraordinarily Majestick’.134 These marks, displaying
themselves through the forms of the dream, were distinct and perceivable,
though often not expressible except by their ‘superior’ or ‘excellent’ nature.
They could not be imitated by a demon. This claim can be compared to a
sequence in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan’s mixed passions ‘dimm’d’
and ‘disfigur’d’ his angelic countenance, betraying him in manner that could not
befall a ‘Spirit of happie sort’.135 Amyraut next pointed to lore stating that the
devil’s nature was always betrayed in his physical manifestations, by stray
characteristics such as clawed fingers.136 These betraying characteristics were
always related to animal-like and bestial forms, always applied as the binary
opposite to the humane nature. Tryon claimed that angels appearing in the
height of masculine perfection were clean-shaven, because hair growth was a
form of bodily excrement – any bearded angel was thus a demonic
apparition.137 Forms suitable to represent debased essences of demons thus
tended either to be chimeras, blending human forms with animal features and
characteristics, or were wholly animal. In Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy and
Thomas Tryon’s Treatise, both evil spirits, whether angels or the souls of the
129
Ibid., p. 124. 130
Ibid. 131
Amyraut, Divine Dreams Mention'd in Scripture, p. 71. 132
Ibid., p. 75. 133
Ibid., p. 77. 134
Ibid., p. 77. 135
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. IV. l. 114—128. 136
Amyraut, Divine Dreams Mention'd in Scripture, pp. 72—73. 137
Tryon, Dreams & Visions, p. 124. For a similar assertions see Samuel Hartlib to John Worthington (20 August 1661), MS copies at University Library, Cambridge (Baker's MSS. Mm 1.40, pp. 193-238), & British Library, Add. MSS 32498, in 'The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington' ed. J. Crossley. Vol. I. (Chetham Society Vol. XIII: Manchester, 1847). pp. 356—365 recorded in HP.
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dead, would manifest themselves variously in the form of ‘a Dog, Cat, Bear, Lion,
Fox, Tyger, Bull, Goat, or other savage Beasts'.138
Scriptural figures, medical theory, astrology, the magical signatures of the occult
universe, the discernment of spirits—all of these bodies of literature and
learning provided material for the symbolic interpretation of dreams, and a
rationale for relating them to the movements of God, the passionate body and
mind, of the terrestrial world, the celestial heavens, the interventions of spirits.
Exploring these different arts and techniques has served to explain how they
were believed to fit into the emblematic world view. They made the claim that
the detection of symbols, similitudes, analogies, metaphors and allegories was
part of the study of nature. They also furnished the stock-piled wisdom of the
ages, so that tomes of such symbols—the Bible, medical texts, astrological
tomes, dream dictionaries and manuals, and occult books of secrets—were read
as the perspicacious wisdom of past masters who had possessed the high
degree of wisdom to perceive these partially objective relationships between
symbols and natural causes. The endlessly reflective character of the
emblematic universe, however, means that these sources in no way exhausted
the symbolic and cultural resources that could be brought to bear on the
interpretation of dreams. While the origins of dreams and the knowledge they
were claimed to access might be hidden, secret, abstruse, our analysis of dream
interpretation practices shows that they were not arcane, esoteric or in any way
alien to the mentality of the times.
The training which Thomas Hill and Cornelius Agrippa recommended for
learning the meaning of dream signs corresponds easily with the moral, literary
and metaphysical modes of interpretation which were absorbed generally by
the educated in the early modern period. It was focused on broadening
experience through furnishing and expanding the memory, and applying this
knowledge to ones’ observations of the natural world. This was accomplished
through educational texts, rhetorical handbooks, collections of adages, parables
and apothegms which systemized and made accessible the symbolic and
hermeneutic resources of the period, and through personal aids like the keeping
of a common-place book, in which records of dream symbols have also been
discovered. Michael Bath observes the close relationship between the
composition and organization of these books and the promotion of mnemonic
techniques in schools and learned culture.139 Their contents could often be
ordered according to principals of similarity and antithesis, and concentrated
information around categories and themes which allowed them to be
remembered and deployed in argument. Mnemonic systems themselves joined
138
Tryon, Dreams & Visions, pp. 199. 139
Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 28—56; see also on educational culture Clark, pp. 55—56.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
187
visual forms to these schemes, so that images were explicitly put to work
encoding knowledge and a system for retrieving and employing it. Through
impressing natural objects and their meanings in the memory, ‘Invention,
Memory and Judgment’ – the operations of the intellect – would all be
enhanced.140 When this knowledge was applied to world, students were often
instructed to proceed by constructing argument on the basis of allegorisations,
based upon the symbols they observed in the world around them.141
The dream interpreter’s books joined this universe of symbolic and
‘emblematic’ material, where they could be drawn upon by the wider society,
and likewise, he contextualised such works within a much more expansive
symbolic universe. We know this, because we can observe instances in which
dream interpreters looked beyond these sources in their attempts to gloss a
particular image or similitude of a dream. We know that a theologian like
Joseph Mede referred to dream-signs from the Oneirocriticon of Achmet as
authoritative even as he sought to interpret Revelation.142 On the other side,
Joseph Hall drew on one of Artemidorus’ dream figures to embellish a sermon
rather than interpret a dream.143 This use of ancient dream interpreters by a
millenarian theologian and an English Restoration preacher shows us that
despite controversy over the nature of dreams and origins, the assumption that
there were some dreams worthy of interpretation, and that these drew upon
the symbolic values of the natural world, was of a general credence in the
seventeenth century.
Earlier we observed a distinction between meaning that was perceived in
dreams by illumination, and by way of human learning. The practices of early
modern education and cognitive theory demonstrate how the effects of
illumination—heightened intellectual judgment, intuitive understanding of
signs, perfected memory—were depicting heightened states of cognitive
functions, abilities which were trained in the common course of life, and which
dream interpreters sought to apply to their natural signs. In the world of the
occult the two realms tended to merge together, as interpretive practise
granted divine insight, increased moral worthiness, and fitted the mind for
higher elevations. By implication, expanding one’s knowledge of the divine
140
Obadiah Walker, Of Education, Especially of Young Gentlemen, (Oxford, 1673), p. , quoted in Bath, Speaking Pictures, p. 124—163.
141 Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures, p. 31—51.
142 Joseph Mede, The key of the Revelation, searched and demonstrated out of the naturall and
proper charecters of the visions (London, 1643), pp. 64—68. 143
Joseph Hall, The balm of Gilead, or, Comforts for the distressed, both morall and divine most fit for these woful times (London, 1650), pp. 267—268. Hall’s use of Artemidorus to observe that ‘to dream of children, imports cares to follow’ seems to have been picked up by Richard Allestree in The art of patience and balm of Gilead (London, 1694), p. 113. Reference is to ‘Artimedor de insomniis, Lib. 1. Cap. 6.’
Dreams and the Passions in Revolutionary England
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opened the mind to its influence, just as Goodwin’s reader would find himself
communing with God if he reformed his dreams. Emblematic symbols were
employed in a textual form as spurs for spiritual meditation, in which their
ability to signify aspects of the divine were thought to elevate the mind toward
them. This made it natural to identify them with the images of dreams, and with
a culture of knowledge which tied the occult significations of natural experience
to the higher mysteries of God.
Dreams, Passions and Certain Knowledge The clear and intuitive knowledge thought to be conferred in prophetic
illuminations of the mind was the ultimate goal not just of the prophet, but
of those who sought to find the highest forms of secular knowledge as well.
Comenius hoped that by correctly ordering the evidence of sense, reason
and scripture, all assertions might be adjudicated by a single rule, that ‘If
any thing be not evident enough with its own perspicuity, let it be taken as not
said at all.’144 Henry More claimed that ideas should be tried by ‘either the
Common notions that all men in their wits agree upon, or the Evidence of
outward Sense, or else a cleer and distinct Deduction from these’.145 A
number of scholars have suggested that Descartes’ Meditations, which were
designed to teach one how to achieve ‘clear and distinct perceptions’, were
inspired by Jesuit meditation practices, and interpretive techniques which
he applied to his own ecstatic dreams in the Olympias.146 The philosophical
method of the Meditations thus represented an innovative compounding of
meditative practise and phyrronistic scepticism, in which he threw into
doubt the reality of his sensory perception. The fact that Descartes’ ‘clear
and distinct perception’ emerged from stripping away the presentations of
the senses and the occlusions of the imagination has been deemed in part
paradoxical in light of the apparently ‘enthusiastic’ origins of Descartes’
calling. Descartes’ mechanical philosophy and his epistemological method
would reject entirely the emblematic basis of thought, but he still shared its
goals. Attempts to effectively organize learning and knowledge, and to
establish an absolute method for determining its outlines, aimed at
comprehension of the divine, and hence to achieve the same kind of
certainty that God conferred in prophetic visions and dreams.
The goal of the Spiritual Exercises, the meditative practices which Descartes
learned from the Jesuits, was to make decisive decisions or ‘elections’ based
144
Comenius, Natural Philosophie Reformed, di. 21. 145
Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, pp. 53—54. 146
Anthony Grafton, ‘Traditions of Conversion: Descartes and his Demon’ in Christina Gillis and Jill Stauffer (eds), Doreen B. Townsend Centre Occasional Papers, No. 22 (2000), pp. 1—32.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
189
upon the ‘consolations’ or ‘discouragements’ that one received in
imaginative and spiritual reflection on the state of the soul and on the
nativity, passion and resurrection of Christ. It was an introspective tool for
producing knowledge about the self in relation to the divine, and modelled
in great part on mystical disciplines intended to achieve the ‘ascent of the
soul’ by stripping away attachment to carnal objects, wrong opinions and
desires, and false conceptions of the divine.147 Emblem books, as Michael
Bath demonstrates, often represented this spiritual journey, and were thus
intended as meditative aids in its pursuit.148 Phillip Goodwin, pursuing his
vision of divine dreams as graces that edified the spirituality of the dreamer,
observed that ‘Such Dreames as are the mountings of the mind and as make
the mind to mount, 'tis manifest their spring-head is in Heaven.’149 Thomas
Browne, in discussing the potential of dreams for self-knowledge, used
language that appears to recall the Exercises:
Men act in sleepe with some conformity unto their awaked senses, &
consolations or discoureagments may bee drawne from dreames, which
intimately tell us ourselves.150
By grace of gradually being conformed to the will to God, the Ignatian
meditator became capable of making a certain election as a result of his
conversion.151 The same ideas about remaking the image of the soul in the
image of God, and thereby achieving union with his will, and being actuated
by it, described the state of union in Agrippa and in Boehme. If the order of
divine nature was conferred on the mind in dreams through a state of ‘clear
and distinct’ perceptions, then the ultimate proof of their divinity lay in their
ability to produce actions that accorded with the character and providential
purpose of God.
It was thus the case that moral knowledge gained from dreams presented
the clearest evidence to dreamers, and that the moral actions of dreamers
were typically described as the clearest sign of their status as a true or false
prophet. William Perkins observed that the end of all divine dreams was to
‘further religion… and to maintaine true doctrine’, while the devil aimed at
‘subuersion of true religion & the worship of God’, which he would displace
with ‘Idolatrie and superstition’.152 Like the bodies of angels which
appeared falsely as an angel of light, a false prophet ‘brings his dreame, and
147
Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises: Extended Annotated Edition, (trans.) Elder Mullan (Electronic Ed, 2012).
148 Bath, Speaking Pictures
149 Philip Goodwin, The Mystery of Dreames, pp. 319—320.
150 Brown, ‘On Dreams’, pp. 230—233.
151 Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, loc. 1145—1216, 11850—2061.
152 Perkins, The Damned Art of Witchcraft, p. 103.
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vtters it, yea and confirmeth it by a wonder; but marke his ende: It was to
draw men to Apostacie’.153 It was these visible ends which betrayed the
truth of their nature, and which Philip Goodwin mapped out so thoroughly
in his typology of deluded, filthy, vain, troubled and pious dreamers. Henry
More similarly looked to exclude ‘any man [who] shall pretend to the
discovery of a Truth by inspiration that is of no good use or consequence to
the Church of God’. He gave account of the histories of false prophets by
paying attention to their licentiousness deeds, and to their atheistic beliefs,
which he attributed to their drowning in melancholic passions.
The movements, perturbations and energies of the passions were the
subject of intellectual reflection, and bestowed knowledge on those who
took care to observe their directions. Thomas Adams warned that for the
sinner laboring under the judgment of God and his own conscience, self-
knowledge was inescapable:
As in that great plague on Egipt, all the waters in their Riuers, Streames,
Ponds, Pooles, Vessels were changed into blood, so shall it be in the
conscience of the Murderer: his eyes shall behold no other colour but red,
as if the ayre were of a sanguine dye: his visions in the night shall bee all
blood; his dreames sprinkling blood on his face…154
So, Perkins said, the wicked man ‘will not take notice of his enormities by
the light of the Law; yet euen by his owne dreames in the night, his
wickednes shall be in part discouered’.155 John Smith found the difference
between divine and natural dreams evident, and those who failed to discern
them culpable: ‘the false might, if they would have laid aside their own fond
self-conceit, have known as easilie that God sent them not.’ 156 In the quite
different context of his mystical dreams, with their goal of gnostic union
with the divine, Thomas Tryon nevertheless placed passionate knowledge at
the center of the experience. Through its spiritual senses, the soul would
‘really enjoy pleasure or pain, according to that principle that predominates
therein’. A soul which generated evil dreams would find ‘it apprehends it
self to be in real danger of drowning, falling, killing, being run through with
Knives, Swords, and the like’, while in good dreams it would enjoy ‘a more
compleat and unmixed pleasure and delight, than is possible for any person
to enjoy when awake’.157 These experiences represented not only self-
knowledge, but a form of gnostic prophecy, as ‘the Soul, From the very same
principle after death does proceed, and is generated either his Joy or Sorrow
153
Ibid., p. 103. 154
Adams, The deuills banket , pp. 59—60. 155
Perkins, The Damned Art of Witchcraft, p. 96. 156
Smith, Select Discourses, p. 207. 157
Tryon, Dreams & Visions, pp. 59—60.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
191
according to the degree and nature of that Form’.158 Tryon claimed that the
soul often jolted the body awake when the bliss or the terror of its nocturnal
visions became too great, a refuge which it would lose after death.159
Outside of moral knowledge, there was the judgment of providence itself.
So it was that John Cook claimed, ‘when the Imagination is so
extraordinarily powerful, and that the party dreaming is confidently
perswaded that it will come to passe it commonly proves accordingly’.160
Amyraut was concerned to know not just how how prophets and godly men
were morally enriched, but confident enough to act upon contingent and
circumstantial knowledge in dreams – to know that they were truly
provident and not accidents or illusions. God’s command to Abraham to
sacrifice Isaac must have carried some certain mark, ‘being so contrary to
his natural affections, and having the appearance of a barbarous and
unparallel'd cruelty’.161 The certainty of Joseph that Herod threatened Jesus
did not admit the doubts that should attend natural dreams.162 The only
explanation was that the dream was compelling in a manner that was
absolute, rational and divine.163 The answer to this lay, as we have seen in
this chapter and in chapter two, in comparisons of the sensory quality of
dreams, and the effects which they produced in the faculties. In this chapter,
we have examined in greater detail how precisely these effects were
understood to express themselves in the particulars of a dream experience.
Amyraut admitted that men may be certain of divine dream simply by virtue
of illumination itself, since God could produce an ‘extraordinary
determination of his understanding’. However, Amyraut believed that proof
also lay naturally within the objects of vision themselves, and that it was the
dialectical comparison between natural and divine dreams which produced,
as we have said, a decisive movement of the mind.164
After a natural dream, Amyraut claimed, we ‘make an attentive reflexion
thereupon, and carefully examine and consider them in all their
circumstances’. This usually discovered them to be ‘vanities’, ‘and so we
free our selves from that disquietness they had before caus'd’.165 If this did
not suffice, ‘we compare them with those true and real operations, which
our senses produce in us waking’, which revealed them to move the
158
Tryon, Dreams & Visions, p. 63. 159
Ibid., p. 64, 65. 160
Cook, A True Relation of Mr. John Cook’s, p. 14. 161
Amyraut, Divine Dreams Mention’d in Scripture, p. 56. 162
Ibid., pp. 58—59. 163
Ibid., p. 81. 164
Ibid., p. 80—83. 165
Ibid., pp. 64—65.
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192
emotions no more than a dramatic play at a theatre.166 For those who
experienced divine dreams the experience was ‘directly contrary’:
they were more fully perswaded of their Divinity, then we are of the reality
of the operation of our senses, when waking they exercise themselves upon
their respective objects.167
Since God also enlightened the faculties of judgment, it too was ‘more
excellent and more exact in its judgments then tis possible for the common
sense to be’. The knowledge derived from such dreams was thus
‘proportionably more perfect, and the perswasion of the divinity of these
dreams more certain and more undoubted‘.168 And it was the dreadful form,
order and magnitude of the dream images, presenting themselves above
rather than out of the order of nature, which put men like the patriarchs and
the secular kings and princes of the Bible into passions of ‘Reverance,
Admiration and Amazement’.169
The act of interpreting dreams forms one particularly distinctive strand in early
modern hermeneutic practice, the practices which structured the religious
examinations by which the individual was compelled to measure himself
against the world in its transcendent dimensions, and elevate himself by the act
of moral election. The rationale of discernment was that cultivation of the mind
resulted in this spiritual and therefore metaphysical movement. In order to
achieve truthful discernment, a mechanism and a process was required by
which the condition of the natural self could be juxtaposed against the divine.
This juxtaposition, as a sorting, categorising and deciphering of divine forms
was an intellectual operation on paper, but an instinctual and autonomic one in
human experience. In contemplative and meditative theory, the mind tracked
its position relative to divine objects of cognizance via the affective movements
of ‘consolations’ and ‘discouragements’, which brought the mind eventually to a
moment of crisis, the point at which the continuity of its state could not be
endured, and the disturbance of the spirit necessitated a more fundamental
change in the direction and pattern of its movements – what Ignatius Loyola
termed an ‘election’.170 Amyraut demonstrates how this theory was applied to
the extraordinary phenomena of prophetic inspiration in dreams. His analysis
166
Ibid., pp. 65. 167
Ibid., p. 66. 168
Ibid., p. 68. 169
Ibid., p. 100. 170
‘The first time is, when God our Lord so moves and attracts the will, that without doubting, or being able to doubt… The second, when enough light and knowledge is received by experience of consolations and desolations, and by the experience of the discernment of various spirits… the third time is quiet, when one considers, first, or what man is bor… and desiring this chooses as means a life or state within the limits of the Church.’ – Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, loc. 1145—1216.
On the Interpretation of Dreams
193
integrated the different phenomenal aspects of dreams which we have
examined to explain how they produced the conditions necessary for acting
upon the sensory differences observed between natural and divine dreams.
Divine dreams, like mystical contemplation, elevated the soul through scales of
sensory and sensual sensation, to intelligible understanding, and ultimately to
spiritual meaning. In this highest scale of cognitive activity, the soul did not just
perceive and know, but the will was actuated and moved toward the divine. It
experienced the feelings of love, of certainty and of faith.171 The phenomenal
and rational reality of the dream intuitively demanded belief, and instinctively
compelled action.
Conclusions
Chapter Four shifted our focus to look more closely at the subject of dream
interpretation as a philosophical art, applied to the phenomenology and the
symbolic meanings of individual dreams. It moved us beyond categories and
taxonomies employed as part of an analytical schema for classifying different
kinds of dreams, and instead sought to make distinctions between different
practices for ‘reading’ them, applied either to its phenomenological qualities in
in the mind, or to the semiotic meanings of their objects. It argued for the
rationality of dream interpretation from within this world-view, with different
perspectives on the legitimacy of dream interpretation predicated mostly upon
different attitudes to the claims of occult philosophy and natural magic. In the
early seventeenth century, learned discourse on dreams in the realm of
medicine tended to be restricted to the natural sympathies and
correspondences between dreams and the body. However, this diagnostic
function itself was a gateway to the more occult theory of dreams, replete as
they were with iconistic and emblematic imagery. The restricted but
occasionally allusive discourse of physicians and divines existed in a cultural
space which bordered with notions that images acted as a gateway to higher
meanings. That these notions penetrated into wider Protestant thought is
demonstrated by Joseph Mede’s use of Achmet in his Clavis Apocalyptica, and
Amyraut’s co-option of occult dream mechanisms to explain the significance of
angelic and providential dreams – analogical and metaphorical languages
retained their utility if they could be claimed to have been designed by God. The
emblematic mentality therefore maintained some traction alongside
theological accounts which established the sacred or profane character of
dreams by comparing their contents and phenomenology to the teleological
hierarchies of natural Aristotelian vision and the contemplative ascents of
171
James, Passion and Action, pp. 234-236; ‘Reason, the passions, and the good life’, pp.1358—1361; ‘The Passions in Metaphysics and the Theory of Action’, pp. 935—954; Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 162—168.
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Neoplatonism, even if they rejected the occult approaches which utilised the
sympathetic power inherent in hieroglyphs, sigils and magical images in
astrology and natural magic.
The relevance of ‘emblematic’ visual culture extended beyond the date of 1650,
even if they were losing their relevance in studies of the natural world. Emblem
books maintained their association with religious devotion and meditational
practice, and were considered a valid concept through which to discuss the
dream in the late 1650s and 1676. John Smith’s Select Discourses expressed the
symbolic power of dreams as a dialogue of condescension or accommodation
that existed specifically between God and man, without any necessary roots in
the mystical substrate of nature—nevertheless, these figures were still
described as ‘Hieroglyphicks and Emblems in the Fansie’. The decline of
emblematic and symbolic reading was therefore a gradual process, a slow
breaking down of the wider associations which such forms retained in the past,
and in certain sections of society into the latter decades of the seventeenth-
century.
The most obvious impact of intellectual change in the seventeenth century
would be the collapse of emblematic views of nature with the advance of the
mechanical philosophy, which reduced the philosophical significance of
creatures and objects to their material natures and functions. Without the
peripatetic view of nature, similitudes, metaphors and analogies could no
longer describe identity and relationship according to principles of corruption
and generation, changes of place or unnatural motion. Instead, mechanical
accounts of their phenomenology reduced them to impressions that collided in
matter, or traced out of physical marks in the bodily memory. Even those
approaches which still situated themselves in occult metaphysics did not
necessarily share the sacramental view of nature which dominated the
philosophical mind-set prior to the Reformation. However, the vitalistic
principles of vision which animated the cognitive faculties, and stimulated the
carnal and spiritual components of will, retained their relevance in the work of
Smith, Goodwin and Amyraut. The 'perfections' of the signs sensed in divine
dreams, and of the cognitive senses and movements which they inspired in the
spirit, were taken to impart a certainty and plausibility to divine dreams which
explained and authorised the actions of their recipients, and set them apart
from the deficient fantasies of enthusiasts. Discursive analyses like that of
Amyraut made explicit ontological realities which already informed the
powerful moral instincts of the soul, realities which governed the movements of
willpower (the intellectual appetite) as surely as those of the carnal lusts. Moral
certainty, the foundation of virtuous and providential action, was a possession
of inspired and enlightened souls, a holistic experience encapsulated by the
visionary discourse. Concepts of ‘clear and distinct’ perceptions, ‘divine
perfections’ or ‘marks of distinction’, were of this holistic and aesthetic nature.